Each year, tens of millions of individuals seek or need the assistance of healthcare professionals. In order to perform proper diagnoses and to prescribe appropriate treatments, healthcare professionals or providers typically rely on information which is obtained from patients, relatives of patients, previous providers, and/or healthcare facility and/or hospital staff members. The need to have accurate and/or up-to-date data and/or information, in providing healthcare services and/or healthcare-related services, cannot be emphasized enough.
Stories constantly emerge about patients receiving the wrong treatments, having the wrong surgical procedures performed on themselves, receiving a drug or drugs which fatally and/or otherwise adversely interact with another drug or drugs, etc., with stories going on and on. Recently, it has been estimated that between 44,000 and 98,000 individuals die, in the United States alone, as the result of errors or mistakes made by doctors, healthcare providers, and/or healthcare facility workers. There is no doubt that many of these deaths result from inaccurate and/or erroneous information and/or the lack of the availability of correct and/or up-to-date information.
Another problem lies with the fact that the main source of patient information, medical histories, family histories, etc., upon which doctors or providers may base their diagnoses and/or treatments, are patients who usually supply this information on questionnaires or forms just prior to seeing the healthcare provider and/or during a preliminary interview with the provider. In this regard, information obtained from these questionnaires or forms, as well as from these preliminary interviews with the providers, may not necessarily result in sufficient, comprehensive, and/or accurate, information being obtained regarding the patient. Further, there is no guarantee that the same information will be provided, in a uniform manner, to a next or different provider. As a result, patient information may not be uniformly distributed and/or be available to providers at the point of treatment and/or otherwise.
Another problem which exists in the current healthcare system is that doctors or other providers do not always have the latest information and/or research material available to them prior to, and/or during, the diagnosis and/or treatment process.
It is also no secret that healthcare costs are rising at ever-increasing rates and that insurance companies and other healthcare payers expend great resources in processing and reconciling treatment claims and/or claims for healthcare services and/or benefits. Typically, these insurance and/or benefits claims take place in a paper-based environment and, as a result are slow and inefficient. Fraudulent claims and/or claims which cannot be verified pose another major problem for healthcare payers and insurance companies. These problems only serve to add to the growing costs of healthcare, delayed treatments, and a general dissatisfaction with the current healthcare system.
Another problem lies in making up-to-date training materials conveniently available to providers in order to allow providers to remain current with state-of-the-art information and training techniques.
Other problems lie in maintaining patient healthcare records or files private, in safeguarding patient healthcare records or files, in providing notification to patients and other individuals when others have accessed, obtained, and/or made changes to their respective healthcare records or files, and in enabling patients and individuals to restrict and/or limit access to their healthcare records or files.
The list of problems with the current healthcare system goes on and on. In view of the above, there is a great need for an apparatus and a method for providing healthcare information and/or healthcare-related information to the various providers, payers, patients, third party individuals, and/or insurance brokers, agents and/or other intermediaries, which overcomes the shortcomings of the prior art.